Picked up a new toy; thought I’d do a boring technical review for you.
The Nikon D600 should be the perfect enthusiast camera with it’s fantastic specs, great low light performance, and an affordable price point for a full frame sensor. However, many reviewers and blogs have been raising concerns over a severe dust issue. Dust has reportedly been collecting on the upper left corner of the sensor at an unusually high rate.
A show opportunity was dropped in my lap in early October. I’ve spent the last month painting up a storm and avoiding any type of updates on this site. Exciting times!
Many months ago during the daze that was getting ready for my big show, Derek Quenneville made a 3D scan of my torso during a Site3 open house. He uploaded it to a website and made me freely downloadable.
If you have access to a 3D printer, you can download and print your very own Kyle!
Source: Thingiverse
Today is July 15, 2012. I was wasting time, watching some random videos, when something caught my eye; I looked at the side window of my channel, and I realized that I joined youtube on July 15, 2006 That means that today is my 6th anniversary of being a YouTuber.
In the *90 months* that this website has existed, I’ve been around for 73 of them. In that time, I’ve uploaded 248 videos. Those videos have generated over half a million views, which is pretty incredible.
This body of work I’m going to be putting together might make more sense with an understanding of where it’s coming from, and how I got started working in this style.
Back in 2005, I was working a summer job as a landscaper; I knew that come September, I’d be starting my thesis year at art school, and I wanted to hit the ground running, rather than aimlessly wandering between styles and ideas. I laid out all these intricate plans, and mentally sketched out images that I would later paint.
At the time, I was making a lot of work that looked like this. While it doesn’t necessarily photograph all that well, the iridescent and metallic colours glimmer and shift like jewels, creating a very alluring effect. The challenge was integrating this technique into larger images an compositions, rather than the all-over textures I had been producing.
September arrived, and I started testing out my ideas; and every single one of them bombed horribly. Over the next four months, I produced nothing but garbage.
Continue reading Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 3: Some Background Info on My Style
Over the next several months, I’m going to be putting together a body of work for my next big art show. Typically, whenever this happens, artists disconnect from the outside world and disappear into their cave for several months, only emerging once the work is complete – or the deadline has arrived (usually the latter).
For this body of work, I’m going to try something a little bit different. Rather than producing something in private, and only releasing the full finished series of work, along with a poorly written essay filled with confabulations, non-sequiturs and trendy art jargon to back it up, I’m going to pop up every week or so, pull back the curtain, and invite you into my studio. (virtual invitations only. Invitation does not extend to the physical world.) Discuss what I’ve been thinking about, explain how I see my work (note: what you get out of it may vary), I’ll talk about where I plan on taking it. But mainly, this series will be about my working process.
A lot of our projects (like Take a Picture and DRM Box) poke fun at intellectual property. We do things to challenge, subvert or outright mock copyright and content protection.
Why do we take this side of the copyfight? Aren’t we artists? Don’t we benefit from these things?
I take the stance I do because of stories like this: Guy Gets Bogus YouTube Copyright Claim… On Birds Singing In The Background | TechDirt
Companies like Rumblefish claim copyright ownership of birds chirping in the background, and profit off of ads that are placed on these videos, depriving the actual content creator of income. And this isn’t a one off mistake. TechDirt has talked about this same company doing the same thing back in 2009.
Rumblefish has a long history of making false copyright claims against people.
They do seem to eventually drop their false claims after getting a ton of bad press, and being mocked publicly on BoingBoing, Reddit, TechDirt, Google’s own help forums, and Slashdot for several days, but the problem remains: Companies with long histories of profiting by abusing artists and creators go unpunished. And while the issues are being resolved, they are profiting from work they have falsely claimed as their own. This is not a minor mistake on their part; This is mass-piracy for commercial purposes.
According to American law, making a false copyright claim is supposed to be punishable by perjury.
So where are the charges?
As an artist, it absolutely disgusts me that companies push for laws that not only enable censorship and erode our right to free expression, but they also make it harder for me to create. Then they demand ownership of my ideas, strip me of my ability to make a living, try their damnedest to avoid paying me, and claim to be doing all this in my name.
No.
You do not speak for me.
You do not represent my interests.
You threaten everything I stand for and believe in.
That’s why I’ve taken this side of the Copyright debate.
If you’ve been paying attention to this place, or any of the social media venues I frequent, you’ve probably heard quite a lot about the “DRM Box” project Brad and I have been working on.
But it’s been dragging on for months now, and I’m getting a little frustrated, so here’s a little behind the scenes scoop on the project.
The DRM Box was originally envisioned by me as a quick, week-long project to post online as a little internet joke. In my eyes, it just had to be good enough to hold up to video, then we would be done with it. Brad insisted that if we are going to do something, we should do it right, using nothing but the best materials and fabrication techniques for the job. It should be treated as a sculpture, where everything must be perfect, so after the video is made, we have a sculpture that is gallery-worthy. This is a situation where I do think Brad was right. This is art; we aren’t cranking out mass-produced wares for consumption, we are trying to make a unique object to express an idea that we are passionate about, and doing our best work is important.
Of course, going from, “just tape some crap together and hope it sticks together long enough for the shoot” to, “it must be perfect” necessitates a bit of a schedule correction. So, we went from a scheduled week-long build to an estimated month-long build. Then something big came up and my personal schedule changed, cutting out our free time together to about one third of what it once was.
These two factors lead to a project that started to really drag on and go nowhere for a long time.
But, this was ok, because we had a gallery show lined up for the project. The extra work was all worth it. They would be shown in a gallery after all!
Then the show never materialized. I don’t know what happened, but the show fell through.
So here we are, 10 months later, with a project that is well built, and it will be used for a quick little video, then put aside as we get to work on the next project.
But when you spend this much time with a project, when this much effort has been put into it, it becomes hard to treat it like a quick joke. It starts being something that you take seriously. And because we have been talking about it for so long, I fear the audience might also have begin taking this project seriously. I am worried that as far as the DRM Box Project is concerned, the humour is lost.
I’ve been thinking about doing something similar to this since mid-2008:
Martin Klimas’ Paint Sculptures – Images and Story Presented by the Huffinton Post
This is why ideas should be acted upon, rather than just being discussed over and over again. Without execution, ideas are worthless.
Poor execution of a great idea is less valuable than good execution of a poor idea.
One those rare instances where we find good execution of a good idea, that’s where the magic happens.